Sentenced in Delphi: Richard Allen gets 130 years for 2017 murders of Abby, Libby

Allen plans to appeal.

Richard Allen will spend 130 years in prison for the murders nearly eight years ago of Delphi eighth-graders Abby Williams and Libby German.

Judge Fran Gull, an Allen County Superior Court judge assigned to the Carroll County case, told Allen Friday morning that the crimes ranked among the most hideous she’s overseen in 27 years on the bench.

“You sit here and roll your eyes at me as you’ve rolled your eyes at me the entire trial,” Gull told Allen. “These families will deal with your carnage forever.”

Gull could have given Allen between 45 years and 130 years in prison, based on his Nov. 11 conviction.

Allen said little during Friday’s hearing, which included statements from Abby and Libby’s family members who called on him to take responsibility for the crimes and said they hoped he lived in fear in prison the way they were sure the girls had in the final hour of their lives.

Allen’s attorneys have continued to maintain that the wrong person was prosecuted for the murders. They say Allen plans to appeal the verdict.

A jury, selected from Allen County, 90 miles from Delphi, said Allen was guilty on four counts of murder. That followed four days of deliberation after 18 days of testimony and closing arguments in Carroll Circuit Court.

Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, were found dead, with slashed necks, in the woods near the Monon High Bridge Trail on Feb. 14, 2017, a day after they’d been dropped off to spend an afternoon hiking to the Monon High Bridge.

Allen, a 52-year-old former pharmacy tech in Delphi, was arrested and charged for the murders in October 2022. That was 5½ years after the murders, tied to the scene by his self-reported information to investigators in the days after the murders in 2017 that he’d been on the Monon High Bridge Trail the day they went missing. Investigators also pointed to an unspent Winchester .40-caliber Smith and Wesson cartridge found near the girls’ bodies – one an Indiana State Police lab determined had been chambered and then ejected from a Sig Sauer P226 handgun Allen owned and that investigators found at his home.

The case presented by Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland centered on the bullet, video footage from Libby’s phone of a man who came to be known as “Bridge Guy” and more than 60 self-incriminating statements Allen made in phone calls to his wife, Kathy, and mother, Janis, and others documented by prison staff and inmates.

Allen’s attorneys – Brad Rozzi, Andrew Baldwin and Jennifer Auger – attempted to cast doubt on the unspent round, calling it the state’s “magic bullet.” They also presented testimony that Allen had been in a psychotic state by a combination of prior mental health issues and the solitary conditions and 24/7 monitoring at Westville Correctional Facility, where he’d been sent under a safekeeping order when local officials argued conditions in the high-profile murder case weren’t secure enough for Allen in Carroll County Jail.

A day ahead of Friday’s sentencing, Rozzi and Baldwin wrote in a court filing that Allen planned to appeal. They also signaled that they’d advised Allen not to offer testimony during the sentencing hearing and to save anything for a second trial, saying that he didn’t have much to gain when even the lightest sentence would have him in prison well into his 80s.

This story will be updated later Friday.

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